Talent matters in The Piano, but sob stories matter more
Claudia Winkleman, a smart cookie, had her reservations about the second series of The (Channel 4). “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” she tells judges Mika and Lang Lang, “but when we did this the first time I thought, ‘And we’re done.’” That’s because series one was a perfect, self-contained show. The hopefuls had no idea that the pop star and superstar pianist were secretly watching their performances, and that the best of them would be invited to perform at the Royal Festival Hall.
With that element of surprise gone, the programme-makers are borrowing heavily from the Simon Cowell playbook. So when a woman called Emma played Abba’s The Winner Takes It All and an underwhelmed Mika said: “It’s just not working,” the next step was for him to ask: “Do you think she can play something else?” Emma was duly brought back, had an equally practised song up her sleeve, and appeared to wow the judges second time around. We have seen this many, many times on The X Factor.
The auditionees have been chosen for their back stories, not their talent. Which is not to say they don’t have talent – nine-year-old Ethan, for example, was brilliant. But the music was clearly secondary in the producers’ eyes. Instead we had: a boxer who grew up on a needle-strewn council estate but can play Chopin; a young woman who arrived in the UK as a child refugee; a blind man with a guide dog; and the aforementioned Emma, who wept at the memory of her tough divorce. Young Ethan doesn’t seem to understand a lot of emotional feelings, his father said, but can express it through music. He played a song in memory of his uncle, who died from cancer a year ago.
On top of that, there are too many singers. This is supposed to be a pianoplaying contest, not a singing show.
Like I said, though, Winkleman is a smart cookie. And she knows that viewers love emotional stories, and that those stories will eventually overpower any cynicism. Duncan, aged 80, played a piece he had composed for his wife, Fran. In the preamble video, it was revealed that Duncan has dementia. Claudia went up to see Mika and Lang Lang, to demand that Duncan go through to the final. “It’s not a debate,” she said firmly. “Duncan and Fran need it. And it’s also important to have somebody like that. The fact that he can speak through the piano, that’s what is keeping his disease at bay. And what are we if we are not putting that on the stage?” It was a forceful argument, and it won the day.
TWhen Evil Came to Rochdale (Channel 5) may have led you to expect a documentary on grooming gangs. Instead, it went back to an earlier scandal: the “satanic panic” – imported from the US – that led to children being taken from their homes on the strength of outlandish claims about ritualistic sexual abuse.
Social workers are often the scapegoats when child protection goes wrong, according to one of the contributors. “It’s not the GP, it’s not the health visitor, it’s not the police officer – it’s the social worker who carries the can.” Maybe so. But in some of the stories highlighted here, the behaviour of social workers was truly shocking.
In Rochdale in the early 1990s, a sixyear-old boy made claims about ghosts, being locked up, and being given a drink that made him feel that he could fly. This led to 15 children from the same estate being taken into care, many of them seized in dawn raids while still in their pyjamas.
Months later, the same happened in Orkney, with nine bewildered children forcibly removed from their parents and flown to the mainland. This time it wasn’t ghosts, but witchcraft ceremonies in a quarry.
The stories were easily debunked: the six-year-old boy and his sister in Rochdale had been allowed to watch “video nasties” and their imagination ran away with them. The child who made the original claims in Orkney was from a troubled background. The children in both cases were eventually returned home.
But the most disturbing aspect was the willingness of the social workers to believe this stuff. Jean La Fontaine, commissioned by the Government to investigate, concluded that social workers were so convinced of its existence that they were “on a crusade”. Footage from the interviews in Rochdale was awful: adults asked leading questions as the children cried.
This documentary was well-made from one perspective – interviews with the lawyers who represented the families – and included academics versed in the subject. But no social worker or council leader appeared to explain their actions.
The Piano ★★★
When Evil Came to Rochdale ★★★